All posts tagged NCAA Tournament

Fox announcer Bill Raftery before the Villanova-Georgetown game on Jan. 19.

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The broadcaster who coined some of the catchiest phrases in college basketball will finally be calling the Final Four on television.

Veteran commentator Bill Raftery was added to the Turner Sports and CBS Sports broadcast of the NCAA tournament’s Final Four, the networks announced Tuesday, along with former Duke star Grant Hill and Jim Nantz, the longtime voice of the tournament. Read More »

Sulaimon, a junior guard, was averaging 7.5 points this season for the No. 4-ranked Blue Devils, who lost at No. 8 Notre Dame on Wednesday night and travel Saturday to No. 2 Virginia, the only other undefeated team in college basketball besides top-ranked Kentucky. Read More »

Kentucky celebrates its Final Four victory over Wisconsin last season.

Associated Press

After four years of the NCAA trying to convince everyone that the “First Four” was a part of the real tournament, common sense has finally prevailed.

Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s vice president for men’s basketball, announced on Monday that starting in 2016, the opening weekend of the tournament will be renamed the first and second round. Or, in other words, the NCAA has agreed to start calling the opening-weekend games what everyone else in the country calls them. Read More »

The WSJ Sports team provides minute-by-minute analysis of the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game, won by Connecticut over Kentucky 60-54. Rachel Bachman (@Bachscore) and Ben Cohen (@bzcohen) offer commentary from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, while Jim Chairusmi (@jimchair) and Darren Everson weigh in on the CBS telecast.

8:24 pm (EDT)

Ben Cohen

Greetings from the largest place on earth, AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, for college basketball's national championship between No. 7 seed Connecticut and No. 8 seed Kentucky, otherwise known as the matchup everyone expected.

OK, so not even Warren Buffett saw this one coming. It's a wildly unlikely game -- the highest combined seeds ever for a national championship, and the first time since 1966 that two teams absent from the previous year's NCAA tournament are meeting in the NCAA tournament's final -- but one that's perfect for a March Madness that makes others look lucid. This was the tournament of Mercer players doing the "Nae Nae" and Turner analyst Charles Barkley falling in love with a 7-foot Wisconsin center named Frank the Tank. The odds of a perfect bracket this year, according to The Count's study today: 1 in 1.47 quadrillion. (That's 15 zeroes -- or roughly the amount in the check that CBS cuts to the NCAA every year.)

So why shouldn't the national championship be a matchup of one team that lost its regular-season finale by 21 points against another team that lost by 33 points?

Connecticut comes into tonight's game with a star senior (Shabazz Napier), an Alcatraz defender (Ryan Boatright), an emerging big man (DeAndre Daniels), a brilliant young coach (Kevin Ollie) and on a run that includes wins over Michigan State, a team many thought was the NCAA tournament's top team, and Florida, the team that actually was the NCAA tournament's top seed.

Then there's Kentucky, which makes heart attacks feel like mild heartburn. To get here, the Wildcats beat undefeated Wichita State on the last possession; No. 4 seed, in-state rival and last year's champion Louisville in the final minute; last year's runner-up Michigan on a last-second Aaron Harrison three; and Final Four team Wisconsin on a deeper, crazier and still last-second Aaron Harrison three. They did all this despite starting five freshmen, in their first NCAA tournament, and because of a magical "tweak" that Wildcats coach John Calipari made before the NCAA tournament but has protected the way NCAA officials treat courtside soda cans.

Calipari has promised to reveal his strategic masterstroke as soon as the season is over, which means the rest of Big Blue Nation will finally figure out tonight what saved Kentucky's season -- and may have resulted in the school's ninth national championship.

We apply Geoff Foster’s semi-arbitrary “metric” to UConn vs. Kentucky: Which team deserves to win? The four-man weave is disappointed that we’ve seen both the Huskies and Wildcats too recently in the national title game.

We set up Masters week by going through a list of players Geoff thinks are long overdue to win a major title.

Plus, we check in on the Kentucky Derby contenders and dip our toe in the NBA water.

Kentucky celebrates after guard Aaron Harrison made a three-point basket in the final seconds against Wisconsin to advance to the national championship.

Associated Press

The symbolism is not lost on the players. Kentucky’s Julian Randle knows that his Wildcats, who play in Monday night’s college basketball national championship title game, are the first team that starts five freshmen to make the final since the infamous Michigan Fab Five. When players so young are so good, it seems to advance a new argument for the state of the game—because if this is the way it works for some people, why can’t it work for everyone?

The thing is, though, that Michigan lost. So could Kentucky, if the Connecticut Huskies are able to pull off an improbable tournament run—this one made without a plethora of McDonald’s All-Americans—by focusing their staunch defense on the Wildcats’ proficient talent. That’s not an easy bet to make—not when considering what talent has gotten Kentucky so far. But the Huskies have their own prodigy, too: coach Kevin Ollie would be the fastest non-interim coach in college basketball history to win it all, which happened in part because he, like Kentucky’s John Calipari, sought to add more elements of the professional game to his program. Read More »

On the latest Sports Retort, Jason Gay joins the four-man weave to explain his side of his very real beef with the NCAA over a cat mug. We wonder if the NCAA might be missing a chance to sign a deal for an official cat mug sponsor. This leads to questions about why talking about cats offends dog people. Jason also weighs in on Wisconsin, his alma mater, playing in the Final Four and his memories of days before the Badgers’ Motion W—which he despises. (Jason joins us at the 17:35 mark, right after halftime.)

Plus, we get down to the business of early-season MLB trolling. I encounter little sympathy for my complaint about the difficulty of following basketball and hockey teams in the playoffs at the same time. With Billy Hamilton off to a slow start in Cincinnati, we debate whether baseball would be better with more stolen bases, and disagree even more about whether the 1985 Cardinals were fun to watch. Plus, NCAA tournament fatigue and much more. Read More »

Some college basketball fans believe that the “Cinderella” concept tarnishes the purpose of producing a competitive program year in, year out—that simply because a lower seed gets hot in March doesn’t mean they’re fit to sniff the air of programs who’ve slugged it out all year, and often the years before that. (Without generalizing, let’s call these “Duke fans.”) Then there are the fans who see a team like Dayton pacing their way to the Elite 8 as a 11 seed and think, “Isn’t this the point?”

With respect to the former group, yes. After battering Stanford in their Thursday night Sweet 16, the Flyers have scored their third straight upset over a power conference team and suddenly vaulted them into a conversation that begins with “Well, why not these guys?” In lieu of star talent, Dayton has adopted a “think deep” philosophy that’s given them multiple players at every position, none of whom average a lot of points but are inserted in a hurry. Take Kendall Pollard, the freshman who came into Thursday averaging 2 points and 8 minutes a game: Against Stanford, he was the second leading scorer with 12 points. “Credit [coach Archie] Miller with refusing to get uptight with his rotation,” writes Yahoo’s Pat Forde. “At this time of year, coaches will bail on a lot of role players, relying on their best guys – and sometimes exhausting them in the process. If anything, Miller is opening it up even more.”

Against Kansas, Stanford could hope to bottle up star Andrew Wiggins and let the struggles trickle down from there. The Flyers, however, were too decentralized for such a strategy. “They got here thanks to a relentless offense predicated on speed, selfess passing (19 assists) and substitution patterns that resemble hockey line changes,” writes Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel. “Stanford looked so overwhelmed at times that it wouldn’t have been surprising for coach Johnny Dawkins to try to insert former Stanford defensive back Richard Sherman, who was sitting behind the Cardinal bench. (Or at least consult Condoleezza Rice, who was sitting behind Sherman).” Not that it gets any easier from here: Now, they’ll face a Florida team that’s just reached their fourth consecutive Elite Eight after putting down UCLA, and hasn’t lost since December. Read More »

New Orleans Saints tight end Jimmy Graham slam dunks over the goalpost.

Associated Press

Does the NFL have a celebration problem? Kevin Clark joins the Sports Retort to discuss the latest NFL news and explains why he thinks the Tampa Bay Buccaneers emerged as the big winners during free agency.

Plus, a breakdown of all the Sweet 16 matchups and why bringing up your bracket is as annoying as talking about your fantasy team.

Frustrated that schools during March Madness are strictly evaluated by something as insignificant as basketball ability, The Wall Street Journal created the first-ever Alumni Bracket last week. Here, the colleges and universities participating in this year’s NCAA tournament were judged by an entirely different set of criteria: How great are their alumni?

For each of the 68 schools involved, we selected a starting lineup of five influential alums from the worlds of business, entertainment, politics and art. It didn’t matter if these alumni were living or dead, undergraduates or Ph.D.’s, or even whether they graduated. They just needed to attend. The only ineligible alumni were people who are primarily known as athletes, coaches, team owners or announcers.

Based on our best judgment, we played out the whole tournament using the actual 2014 bracket. The winning team in each match-up was selected based on which group of players we deemed more famous, revered and/or important. There were definitely a few surprises. Senator Marco Rubio’s Florida Gators were stunned in the first round by the No. 16 seed Albany, led by the potent combination of Steve Guttenberg and Harvey Milk. Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella led Milwaukee to the Elite Eight. And Rudy Giuliani’s Manhattan College team also proved a bracket buster.

But at the end of the day, the chalk prevailed. Harvard’s potent combination of four U.S. presidents and the world’s richest man proved too much for any opponent. The Crimson defeated Wisconsin in the Alumni Bracket final despite a noble effort from Badger point guard Frank Lloyd Wright.

But with the Sweet 16 comes a new weekend and a fresh chance to shuffle the deck!

There are 16 basketball teams remaining in the actual tournament, and here’s how their alumni match up. (Thankfully, Harvard was already eliminated.) Some of the match-ups are tough: George Washington Carver battles Meg Ryan; James Earl Jones takes on Cormac McCarthy. While some look like routs: We doubt Father Guido Sarducci and Dayton can pull an upset over Sandra Day O’Connor and Stanford.

Vote on who you think wins the alumni battle in Thursday and Friday’s eight games. Read More »

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About The Daily Fix

Jeremy Gordon is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, MTV and Prefix and occasionally Tumbles and Tweets. The last time he cried was when Steve Bartman dropped the ball.

Jared Diamond writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. He currently serves as a beat reporter covering the New York Mets and Major League Baseball.

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In baseball, there is a long-standing tradition of pro teams inviting college teams to play them in preseason exhibitions. A look at this odd tradition, and the awkward, no-win situations it creates for the pros.